Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

7/16/01 News Report -- Stuart/Port St. Lucie News (Stuart, FL)

Farm-worker rights are becoming a hot topic in Washington these days, with the United States and Mexico negotiating guest worker programs and legislators working on bills concerning migrant workers.

But because there are so many competing ideas and concepts, some doubt the politics will ever translate into reality.

Sen. Bob Graham, D-Miami Lakes, came within an inch of passing major legislation last year that growers and farm workers supported, but Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, put a halt to the bill at the last minute, objecting to its amnesty provisions.

Graham plans to reintroduce his bill from last year, and Gramm is contemplating guest worker legislation that would force workers back to their home countries when the harvest season is finished.

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, joined the mix last week with his own bill. Several conservative Republicans and growers support it, but farm workers strenuously oppose it.

On the diplomatic level, the Mexican government has told the Bush administration it will not accept any new guest worker program that doesn't offer broad "regularization," which would allow Mexican workers to legally live in the United States and have access to benefits such as Social Security.

Back in Florida, migrant worker Lucas Benitez says none of the talk in Washington addresses workers' true needs: better wages and improved working conditions.

"In the long term, this isn't the path to better working conditions and better treatment," said Benitez, who is based in Immokalee.

The government needs to include agricultural workers in the list of groups covered by the National Labor Relations Act, he said.

That would allow groups such as Benitez's Coalition of Immokalee Workers to unionize and lobby for an increase in the minimum wage, he said.

Politically, that's not going to happen. Such issues are not even on the table as farm-worker talks proceed in Washington.

But there is one goal that farm-worker advocates and growers share: the desire to legalize the large population of workers living in the United States.

That's why Graham and Craig are contemplating an amnesty program. Under both proposals, workers would earn legal residency by working varying numbers of days within six years, provided they were already living in the United States and working the fields for a certain amount of time before the legislation passes.

But Gramm adamantly opposes amnesty. He says it would effectively grant growers the ability to choose whom they wish to confer citizenship upon by keeping immigrant workers employed.

In the Senate, it only takes one senator to keep a bill from going to a vote.

"Anything that smacks of (amnesty) we'll oppose," Gramm spokesman Larry Neal said.

The mention of amnesty has the Mexican government treading lightly. Although officials argue for "regularization," they know the "A-word" is too politically explosive to discuss.

"We have been very careful not to use the 'amnesty' word," said Miguel Monterruvio, the press secretary at the Mexican Embassy in Washington. "What we are asking for is the regularization of Mexicans who are leaving (Mexico)."

Whether it's called amnesty or regularization, though, the concept will be difficult to pass in Congress.

Gramm has allies in fellow Texas Republicans Tom DeLay, the House majority whip, and Lamar Smith, who sits on the House Immigration Subcommittee.

But there isn't much negotiating room between one side that wants to offer more green cards and another that doesn't want to give any out, immigration expert Mark Krikorian said.

"There will be a lot of sound and fury, but there's enough resistance to an idea for amnesty for illegal aliens that it's going to be difficult to get something through," said Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that favors limiting immigration.

The center's research director completed a report last week detailing the negative effects of unlimited flows of unskilled immigrants - particularly Mexicans - into the United States.

Increasing the supply of unskilled labor does not affect most American workers, but it does depress wages for the lowest-paid working poor, the report stated.

The report also showed that immigrants and Mexicans are much more likely than native-born Americans to live in poverty, be without health insurance and use welfare.

In Florida, about 47 percent of immigrants live in poverty, compared to 20 percent of natives, the report stated. Twenty-one percent of immigrants use welfare, compared to 8 percent of natives. And while 33 percent of immigrants are without health insurance, only 15.3 of Americans in Florida are uninsured.

Bringing more guest workers into the country - even temporarily - would prove to be a further drain on the economy and public services, research director Steven A. Camarota wrote.

"The focus needs to be on thinking about ways to bring down the numbers," he said.

Meanwhile, growers say they desperately need more farm workers - either documented U.S. residents or on loan from other countries.

"We've been at this for a long time and it's getting to a crisis point," said Sharon Hughes, executive vice president of the National Council of Agricultural Employers in Washington.

But the amnesty bills being offered - with their working requirements to earn legal residency - amount to indentured servitude, Krikorian said.

"It's really little more than an attempt by employers to hold down wage costs," he said. "Farm-worker wages are down 10 percent in the 1990s. If you need more of something, you don't offer less money for it."

One of the major differences between Graham's bill and Craig's bill is the wage rate.

Graham would offer the average rate of all agricultural jobs - skilled and unskilled - in an area to guest workers employed there.